


When The Doctor Comes To Call

by mountain_born



Series: The Marvelous Tale of an Agent, an Archer, and an Assassin [11]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Crossover, Doctor Who/Avengers Crossover Fusion, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-17
Updated: 2013-10-03
Packaged: 2017-12-26 21:23:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 20,671
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/970444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mountain_born/pseuds/mountain_born
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>River’s past officially catches up with her when a very strange trio of visitors turns up on the base.  No doubt about it, she’s going to have some serious explaining to do.  But first River, Clint and Coulson, and the Doctor, Amy, and Rory have to work together to prevent a disaster at SHIELD.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Story #11 in the Marvelous Tale ‘verse. The Doctor has landed! I thought I’d never make it here, but now that I have, a couple of author’s notes.
> 
> First and foremost, massive kudos again to my incredible beta, **like-a-raven** , who has now been keeping me on the straight and narrow in this ‘verse for almost a year. *mind-boggle*
> 
> Second is a note on Who ‘verse canonical timelines (or lack thereof). When I set up this series, I had to do a bit of tweaking to make my timelines work. Basically, SHIELD present day and Amy and Rory’s present day can be considered the same (meaning that in this ‘verse, Rory and Amy got married in October 2008 rather than June 2010). For the Who characters, this little adventure would be happening at the beginning of Season Six. 
> 
> Obviously, in this ‘verse, River Song wasn’t around for the adventures she canonically took part in, but for the sake of simplicity, just assume that they came off as they should have without her involvement. As the Doctor would say, the paradoxes work themselves out.
> 
> Chapters will be posted on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Happy reading!

_April 9,2009_

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Administration Center_

Coulson frowned as the light over his desk flickered, then shook his head and turned his attention back to his computer, smothering a yawn. It was just after 0700 hours and he hadn’t slept well. There had been too many thoughts running races around his mind.

For one thing, as of 0745, Coulson was going to be the acting head of the New York base. Fury was leaving for Toronto that morning to partake in his annual Rite of Spring, visiting former director Meg Downing for her birthday. SHIELD’s last living founder and first director was turning ninety-one and, as he did every year barring a potential global disaster, Fury was flying up to Canada to wish her many happy returns in person. Coulson had always been a bit bemused by the tradition as neither Fury nor Downing was exactly the sentimental type.

Ordinarily, Coulson might have been tag-teaming the running of the base with Agent Hill, but Hill was overseeing an operation in Los Angeles, which meant he was flying solo. That was all right, though. Coulson knew the job and knew the base. Besides, there was only so much that could go to hell in twenty-four hours.

No, the real reason for his restless night was the file sitting on his desk at his elbow. He’d retrieved it from his apartment a few days ago in preparation for Fury’s absence. The file contained all the information he had on the mysterious set of individuals all known as _Melody Pond_. Coulson had been researching the name ever since it had popped onto his radar during an improvised period of R &R in Scotland back during the winter. After four months, his search had stalled out, but Coulson knew he’d finally found the key to the mystery that had been a part of his life for the last three and a half years: River Song.

Coulson had come to the conclusion that he had stumbled onto a covert black ops program, one that had been around for decades and apparently specialized in training young girls. It wasn’t the first such program SHIELD had come across that took children and turned them into spies and assassins, and unfortunately it probably wouldn’t be the last. None of them were pretty, but this one must have been bad enough that River, one of the most strong-minded people Coulson knew, still wouldn’t talk about it. She still, even after all this time in the safety of the SHIELD fold, kept her past locked up tight. 

There wasn’t a doubt in Coulson’s mind, though, that River had been one of the succession of girls known as _Melody Pond_. God alone knew how she’d broken away.

With any luck, he’d find out soon. He was going to sit River down today and try broaching the topic. Coulson did not expect it to go well, but he hoped that if he eased into it she’d remember that she trusted him.

He hoped. Coulson sighed, leaned back in his chair, and rubbed at his gritty eyes.

“You haven’t been here all night, have you?”

Director Fury was standing in the open doorway of Coulson’s office, one shoulder leaning against the jamb.

“Hi, Boss.” Coulson casually straightened some of the files on his desk, making sure that the one on _Melody Pond_ ended up hidden at the bottom of the stack. He still wasn’t quite ready to bring all of this to Fury’s attention. “No,” he added. “I just decided to get an early start.”

“Yeah, me too. I wanted to get through some work before takeoff. Had twenty-seven complaints waiting in my inbox.” Fury came in and took a seat on the other side of Coulson’s desk. “Babysitting scientists shouldn’t be such a pain in the ass.”

Coulson smiled faintly. This had been their life for almost two weeks now, ever since the Tesseract had been brought onto the base.

The Tesseract was one of SHIELD’s most valuable technological assets, even if, after decades, no one had a damn clue how to use it. It was one of the world’s few known examples of alien technology, purported to be hundreds if not thousands of years old. It had fallen into HYDRA’s hands during the Second World War and had been liberated by none other than Captain America himself. 

Captain Rogers had been lost on that mission, but the Tesseract had been recovered from the ocean by Howard Stark. Stark, along with Meg Downing and three others, had founded SHIELD in the years after the war. The organization had secured the alien cube in a vault specially designed by Stark. No one had ever really cracked how the Tesseract worked, but SHIELD broke it out occasionally for testing.

This was one of those occasions. SHIELD R&D was working on the Tesseract, but they were also playing host to nearly a dozen visiting scientists who had been handpicked by the World Security Council to provide “objective assessments.” The scientists that they’d tapped had some of the best reputations in their fields and the egos to match. Having them all together in one place reminded Coulson of being in a city where volatile diplomatic negotiations were about to take a nose dive.

Fury stretched his legs out in front of him, lacing his hands together over his stomach. “Anything you want to go over before I leave?”

Coulson shook his head. “I think I’m pretty well set. Are you staying in Toronto overnight?”

“I may,” Fury said. “There’s going to be a lot to go over with Downing, and I’ll probably stick my head in the downtown office at least for a few minutes. Barring an emergency, look for me tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll hold the fort,” Coulson said. “Give Director Downing my best.”

“I will.” Fury checked his watch and got to his feet. “I need to grab my bag and head for the hanger. The base is yours, Phil. Don’t have too much fun while I’m gone.”

“No chance of that, Boss.”

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Barracks 2-A, Officers’ Quarters_  
 _3rd Floor_

Clint was going to kill whoever was making that noise.

Whatever the hell it was.

He cracked his eyes open, glancing from the shaded window to the door, trying to determine if the odd sound was coming from inside or outside. Clint couldn’t decide if it sounded more like an asthmatic vacuum cleaner or a geriatric leaf blower. That was one of the few downsides of state-of-the-art hearing aids. Sometimes (like on mornings when he could sleep in), he could hear a little too well.

Before he could hone in on a location, though, the noise stopped.

 _Probably just that damn blue box again_ , Clint thought.

The base had been experiencing odd little technological glitches for a week, ever since the Tesseract’s arrival. Nothing major: flickering lights, uncooperative intercoms, stalled elevators, the occasional rogue appliance, that sort of thing. Clint had taken to blaming the cube, even though their visiting flock of scientists had told him, more than once and with exaggerated patience, that the Tesseract could not possibly be the cause. The Tesseract wasn’t hooked up to anything and the ambient power that it gave off was harmless.

Clint had been able to see for himself that the Tesseract wasn’t wired in to anything. He and River, thanks to their security clearances, were helping to head up security around the labs. The fact that it was just sitting in a clean, static-free chamber didn’t negate the fact that the base systems had been going slightly bonkers ever since it had been moved into R&D. Clint had seen the report from plant management. Service calls had gone up 17%. He didn’t care what the PhDs said, there was a clear connection there.

But today, none of that was Clint’s problem. He deliberately pushed all work-related thoughts to the back of his head. Glitches were glitches. Like the visiting scientists, they were annoying, but hardly a big deal. He and River were off-duty today, which meant that there were much better things he could be thinking about. He smiled, turning his head so that he could smell River’s shampoo and feel her hair tickle his nose. She sighed and shifted against him as he ran his hand down her spine.

Sleeping in could be highly overrated.

*****

A faint noise intruded upon River’s pleasant, half-waking dreams.

She was cocooned in Clint’s bed, his arm wrapped around her and his steady heartbeat under her ear. Today, she knew by her internal calendar, marked three years, seven months, and six days since she’d met her partner and this, for River, had become the epitome of everything being good and right in her world. There was only one discordant note this morning; that odd little noise that was tugging her closer to wakefulness. 

River’s eyes popped open and she sat up abruptly, looking around Clint’s quarters. 

Clint’s dim and silent quarters.

A warm hand came to rest on her back and River looked down at Clint, frowning. “Did you hear something?” she asked.

Clint was smothering a yawn. “Just something running outside, I think,” he said. “Grounds keeping, probably.”

“Mphf. Let’s have them shot.” River combed her fingers through her tangled hair, pushing it out of her face. She was wearing one of Clint’s old t-shirts, the black material faded and the SHIELD logo on the front all but washed away. 

“It’s early,” she added, stretching her arms up over her head. “Considering when our shift ended.”

“Yeah,” Clint agreed. His eyes had drifted down to where the worn cotton was clinging in what must have been a very interesting way. He definitely looked much more awake. “But hey, we’re off duty today. What do you want to do?”

River’s eyes lit up mischievously. “What did you have in mind?”

Technically, they were on-call and expected to remain in the vicinity of the base, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t entertain themselves.

“Hmm. Decisions.” Clint laced his hands behind his head. “We could get in a good long run. Or some sparring practice. We could commandeer a briefing room and watch a movie. Or. . .um. . .” River watched Clint’s train of thought jump the tracks as she slid one leg across his hips so that she was sitting astride him. “Or we could go to that diner down the road, have a nice long breakfast.” 

River raised an amused eyebrow and slowly stripped the t-shirt off over her head.

“Or, you know,” Clint said, running his hands up her legs, “we could just stay in bed a while longer.”

River smiled down at him. “Good plan.”

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Barracks 2-A, Officers’ Quarters_  
 _3rd Floor Laundry Room_

“So, I don’t get it,” Amy Pond said. “Why did the TARDIS bring us here?”

 _Here_ was a rather high-tech-looking laundromat. The TARDIS had materialized at the end of a row of dryers. They had been bound for California, 1939 to look in on the filming of _Gone With The Wind_. It looked as if they’d made a wrong turn.

“Where are we, anyway?” Amy added. “ _When_ are we?”

The Doctor was industriously examining some odd articles of clothing (was that scuba gear?) that had been left on a drying rack. At Amy’s question, though, he straightened, licked one finger, and held it up to test. . .whatever it was he tested. Amy generally thought this part was all for show.

“Same day we left,” he said. “April 9, 2009. We’re near New York City. That’s interesting.”

“So, we haven’t traveled in time, we’ve just hopped across the Atlantic?” Amy asked. “Why?”

“No idea,” the Doctor said, happily. “But the TARDIS must have had some reason for bringing us here. I imagine there’s something around worth seeing. Besides some rather odd washing, of course.”

“Uh, guys?” Rory was at the far end of the room looking out a window. “I think we’re on a base of some sort. Come take a look.”

“A base? Ah! Now we’re talking.” The Doctor bounded over to join Rory at the window. “Dark suits, uniforms, mysterious-looking black vehicles. Lovely. Amy, come see.”

Amy wandered over to join her husband and the Doctor, frowning at one of the overhead lights as she walked under it. It flickered frantically for a moment before glowing bright blue, then settled back to a normal, mundane yellow. Amy shook her head and stood on her toes to peer over Rory’s shoulder.

They were a few stories up and down below she could see people moving around a tidy (and what seemed to be quite large) campus. She spied one group of people outfitted in black moving briskly in formation along the road.

“What kind of base?” Amy asked. “That doesn’t look like American military, does it? At least not from any of the films I’ve seen.”

“No. No, they’re not the usual sort,” the Doctor said. “Look. Look there,” he added, pointing at a large truck that was passing by the building. The trailer that it was pulling was black, and there was an emblem on the side: a stylized eagle head and wings. “Brilliant! I know where we are.”

The Time Lord sounded positively delighted.

“And where is that?” Rory asked.

“This is a SHIELD base.” When Amy and Rory looked blankly at him, the Doctor shook his head impatiently. “SHIELD. Spies, secret agents, shadowy types. The world behind the world. Oh, this will be way more interesting than Hollywood.”

“So you know these people?” Amy asked.

“I might have crossed paths with one or two of them at some point.” The Doctor rubbed his hands together. “There’s something here. Like a humming in the air. Can you feel it?”

“Yeah. That’s probably about a hundred surveillance cameras getting a fix on our position before a bunch of men with very large guns come to corner us,” Rory said dryly. Amy gave him a light swat.

“And whatever’s humming, that’s what the TARDIS wants us to see?” she asked.

“Only one way to find out,” the Doctor said, stepping away from the window. “Come along, Ponds. Let’s go exploring.”

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Administration Center_

River was humming as she stepped off the elevator, carrying a large cup of coffee in one hand and a danish in a paper bag in the other. 

Once she and Clint had finally found their way out of bed, she’d discovered a text from Coulson on her phone asking her to swing by his office when she had a chance. It was probably about her security reports for the past week; River would admit that she had rather been half-assing them. Whatever it was, it clearly wasn’t urgent, so she and Clint had slipped off base and down the road to Evie’s Diner for pancakes. Clint had dropped her in front of the Administration Center on his way to return the car to the motor pool. 

River had bought the coffee and danish on a whim on their way out of the diner. Coulson was serving as acting Director today, which meant a hit of sugar and caffeine probably wouldn’t go amiss, especially since she’d kept him waiting. Besides, the mess hall had been in a minor uproar, off and on, for the last few days. The glitches struck again. 

And here in the wing of offices as well. River had to edge around an orange ladder which had been set up in the middle of the corridor. Patrick Easton, the head of plant management, was perched on top cursing at a mat of wiring he’d pulled from a ceiling access hatch.

“Do you need to call for backup there, Patrick?” she asked.

“Agent Song.” The man twisted a bit to peer down at her. “Would that I could, but we’re spread a little thin today. Trying to keep this damn place from falling apart while the Director’s gone.”

“You’d never let that happen.”

“Fury’ll have my hide if I do.” Patrick gave a long suffering sigh as his radio went off. “Now what?” he said, unclipping the device from his belt and hitting the receive button. “This is Easton. Go ahead.”

River moved on, leaving the man to his work.

She found Coulson at his desk, frowning at his computer screen. He glanced up when River appeared in his doorway, his eyes going to the cup and bag she was carrying. “What’s all this?”

“Me having your back,” River said, coming in and setting the coffee and pastry on the desk. “If I know you, and I do, you’re working through meals today.”

“Thanks,” Coulson said with a half smile. “Do me a favor and close the door, would you?”

River complied and took a seat in front of his desk. “What was it you wanted to see me about?”

“I was hoping you could help me with something, actually,” Coulson said, picking up the cup of coffee. He flipped open a file that was on his desk. “I’ve been catching up on some paperwork related to old cases, and found something I wanted to run by you.” Coulson looked up from the file. “Does the name _Melody Pond_ mean anything to you?”

Decades of training and practice prevented River from letting an overt reaction slip. Even so, she couldn’t help an involuntary widening of her eyes and a shift in her breathing as adrenaline was abruptly pumped into her system. She quickly tried to cover by acting like she needed to sneeze.

“No,” she said casually, making herself meet Coulson’s eyes. “Never heard of her. Why do you ask?”

“Her name came up in relation to Martin Clancy.” Coulson took a photograph from the file and set it in front of River. She glanced at it. It showed a woman with an angular face and short dark hair; it was a face she remembered all too well. “You had said that you and Clancy moved in some of the same circles,” Coulson said. “I thought you might have known or known of her.”

River shook her head. Now that she had moved past the initial heart-thump of panic she was starting to regroup, get her game face on. The problem was, unlike a mark or a hostile interrogator, Coulson knew exactly what her game face looked like. River tried to look relaxed and only mildly interested.

“Sorry, Phil. That’s a new one for me.”

“Yeah? That’s a shame.” Coulson took back the picture and closed the file. “I tried researching her, but keep getting weird hits. The name seems to go back sixty or seventy years, even though there’s no way the woman can.”

River smiled even though her mouth had gone as dry as the Sahara. “Sounds like maybe you just got some bad intel,” she said. “It’s bound to happen, even to SHIELD. Right?”

“I guess so.” Phil was smiling too, but his looked as carefully constructed as River was sure hers did. Or maybe she was just being paranoid. 

“So, was there anything else?” River asked. 

“No,” Coulson said. “No, that was all.”

River nodded and pushed herself out of her chair. “Okay, then. Don’t work too hard today.” 

She had almost made it to the door when Coulson’s voice stopped her. “River?”

River looked back at him. She had known Coulson for three years, seven months, and six days, too; long enough to know how to read him. She knew how to judge his expression and his mood.

Right now he was concerned. 

“Is there anything you want to talk to me about, kid?” he asked quietly.

 _Yes_. “No,” River said.

This time he let her go.

*****

Once River had left, Coulson sagged back into his chair. This was one of those days when he was feeling his age, plus interest.

That had gone about as well as he’d hoped. River had gotten spooked and lied her ass off to him. But that was okay, he’d been prepared for that. The clock had started. The mark was in the open. The comms were up and running. He’d give River a little time and space to collect herself and try again.

He’d have to lean a little harder next time. It was probably time to involve Clint, too, though God knew Clint was going to be beyond pissed when he found out what Coulson had been up to. But they needed to get River to talk to them.

Coulson’s phone started to ring and he pushed himself upright again. _Later_. In the meantime, he had plenty to keep him occupied.

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Administration Center_  
 _Non-restricted Levels_

The Doctor, Amy, and Rory spent the morning wandering around the SHIELD base virtually unharassed.

That really wasn’t a poor reflection on SHIELD, the Doctor thought. True, intelligence organizations often had a bad habit of overestimating how much of that particular quality they possessed. Still, SHIELD, what the Doctor knew of it, wasn’t stupid on the whole. 

The trick to a place like this base was that the hard part was getting _onto_ it. Once you were inside the gates and fences, people just assumed that you belonged there. Furthermore, it seemed that there were a lot of visitors on the base right now, researchers and the like. A few flashes of psychic paper, and the SHIELD employees who approached them had politely waved them on.

They found their way to the base’s central building. The impressive marble foyer had a freestanding wall, a monument to SHIELD’s founders, in the middle of it. In the grand tradition of tourists everywhere, Rory and Amy had paused to read the plaques. 

“Meg Downing, _Minister_ ,” Rory read. “Julien Vasseur, _Grenadier_. Howard Stark, _Caliber_. And then these two.” Rory tapped one of the two plain stars that only had a small name plate apiece. “ _Hope_ and _Aegis_. How big of a secret do you have to be that even the _spies_ can’t know your names?”

“Howard Stark,” Amy said. “Isn’t he some relation to that billionaire fellow who’s always all over the news?”

“The one who can’t keep his trousers on, you mean?” Rory asked.

“Yeah, him.”

“His father, I think,” the Doctor said, only half paying attention. A flickering overhead light had caught his attention.

Blue. That didn’t seem quite right. 

Neither did the automated drinks machine in the cafeteria. A harried-looking young man with a mop had cordoned the area off with yellow plastic cones and tried to wave the Doctor away as he approached. The machine behind him seemed to be performing a synchronized waterfall routine.

“I’m sorry. This one’s out of order. There’s another one on the other side of. . .sir? Sir you really don’t want to do that,” the boy with the mop said as the Doctor set aside his lunch tray and waded through the puddle of mixed sodas.

The Doctor ignored him and pried the front panel off the drinks machine. He didn’t miss the few blue sparks that chased themselves along the tubes and brackets before disappearing back into the machine’s dark recesses. The Doctor pulled out his sonic screwdriver and scanned the innards. 

Yes. It was just as he suspected. Well, not _just_ as he suspected. The energy signature was a bit of a surprise. _Oh, SHIELD_ , the Doctor thought. _What have you been getting up to?_

He was vaguely aware of the boy with the mop fidgeting at his elbow and he could hear Amy and Rory approaching. “You know, they’re billing this as shepherd’s pie,” Rory was saying, “but I swear it’s beef stew with a scoop of mashed potatoes glopped in.”

“Doctor?” Amy said. “What on earth are you doing?”

“I was just telling him that it’s out of order.” The boy was sounding a bit desperate. “There are other machines over on the other side of the salad bar, sir, if you and your assistants would like to use those.”

The Doctor heard Rory snort at the _assistants_.

“Right you are,” the Doctor said, putting his sonic screwdriver away. “Thank you. That was quite educational.”

He left the boy shaking his head and muttering something about _science geeks_ under his breath as he went back to his mopping.

“What was that all about?” Amy asked.

“Possibly just the reason the TARDIS brought us here,” the Doctor said off-handedly, picking up his tray. “Come on. Let’s find a table and eat up. We have lots to do after lunch.”

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Administration Center_  
 _Briefing Room 5_

River paced an erratic path through the empty briefing room, trying to get her fight-or-flight reflex under control. Her more paranoid half was all but screaming _Run! For God’s sake, run! He knows everything. They’ll be coming for you any minute._

 _He can’t possibly know **everything**_ , her more rational side argued. _Aliens? Time travel? Regeneration? How could he? Even if he did somehow find out, Phil is your friend. He’s not going to turn on you._

River took a deep breath and a stab at a logical assessment of her situation.

Coulson knew about Melody Pond, and he knew that Melody Pond was relevant, even if he couldn’t know exactly how. If he hadn’t stumbled onto some connection he never would have brought it up with her. River knew he’d been gauging her reaction to the name. She was also sure that Coulson knew more than he had let on. Coulson _always_ knew more than he let on.

For three years, seven months, and six days River had been able to skate by at SHIELD with her past being largely a mystery. _Melody Pond_ might wind up being the thing that she couldn’t convincingly lie her way around or get Coulson to ignore. That was a problem. 

This was why, when she’d first been brought into SHIELD, she had been determined not to get close to anyone. Loose ties made it easier to pull up stakes and disappear. She’d pretty much screwed herself in that arena. She’d let herself become a part of SHIELD. She’d forged bonds here, strong ones, and she’d been happier than she’d been in decades.

Running might still be the smart thing to do, but now it would hurt beyond the telling of it. She had no one but herself to blame for that.

River stood in the middle of the briefing room, hands laced together behind the back of her neck, thinking. When no epiphanies appeared to be forthcoming she abruptly headed for the door. She needed to find Clint. She’d find Clint and. . .

And what? Tell him good-bye?

 _Tell him the truth. Just tell him all of it. He loves you. He’ll understand. He’ll help you figure out how to talk to Phil._

She’d been thinking about coming clean with Clint for the last four months, ever since England. Unfortunately, being confessional wasn’t exactly in her skill set and this was a secret that she’d closely guarded for a long time. Every time River had been close to saying _There’s something I need to talk to you about_ , she’d chickened out.

She was paying the price for her procrastination now. The subject was being forced, which meant it was escaping her control.

River walked briskly out of the Administration Center. She hoped she’d have figured out what she wanted to say to Clint by the time she actually found him.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to be running around like a mad thing before work tomorrow, so I'm tossing the new chapter up a few hours early. Thank you to everyone who has stopped by to read so far!

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Research & Development_

Amy was against their splitting up. “Nothing good ever comes from this, you know,” she said as the Doctor tinkered with Rory’s mobile phone.

“Yes, well, I need the two of you gathering information,” the Doctor said, passing his sonic screwdriver over the mobile one more time and nodding with satisfaction as the screen display changed. 

“Information on what, again?” Rory said. “What is it you want us looking for?”

The Doctor tucked his sonic screwdriver back in his jacket pocket. “I told you. I need you to scan for non-terrestrial energy signatures.”

“Yeah. You said that before. That’s not actually an explanation.”

“You’re saying that there’s something alien on this base?” Amy asked. “Something other than you, I mean.”

“Yes. And I want a peek,” the Doctor said. “Haven’t you noticed that this base seems to be having a lot of technical difficulties?”

“The lights?” Amy said. “The drinks machine?”

“Precisely.” The Doctor tossed Rory’s mobile phone back to him. “You two take that. Go wander. Anything you see that doesn’t seem to be functioning as it should, scan it and text me the readings. I want to know exactly how widespread the mischief is.”

“What are you going to do?” Amy asked.

“I’m going to go look for the source.”

The Doctor saw Amy and Rory on their way, then headed off in the opposite direction. He had programmed the information that he needed into his sonic screwdriver, and using it like a divining rod, started to track the energy signature. Like a beacon, it drew him straight to a large building bearing the sign _SHIELD Research & Development_.

Once inside the building, he followed the signature three stories underground. Then he hit a snag.

“I’m sorry, Doctor Smith.” The guard frowned at the psychic paper. “I can’t let you into the labs.”

“Oh, but I’m here to do research,” the Doctor replied. “This is where the research is happening, isn’t it?” The Doctor leaned in closer, dropping his voice conspiratorially. “On the _you-know-what_.”

The guard drew back a bit and handed back the psychic paper. “I’m afraid you’re not on my list of people with approved access.” The Doctor saw the guard nod at his colleague, who was standing in the center of the corridor, blocking the path to the labs. “But if you’ll wait right here, we’ll make a few calls and see if we can get this cleared up.”

“That would be lovely,” the Doctor replied.

That meant that in a few minutes, back-up would be arriving. Higher ranked back-up most likely. Higher ranks meant a greater probability of getting accurate answers.

The guard punched a button on his phone. “Agent Barton?” he said as someone on the other end picked up. “It’s Abrams. We need you at the labs right away. We have a situation.”

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Eastern Quadrant_

Clint was just about to call River when he rounded the corner by the gymnasiums and almost bumped right into her. “Hey. There you are,” he said.

He had dropped the car off at the motor pool and gone to wait for River at the ranges; they’d decided to use some of their downtime to get in some extra target practice. Clint had been wondering what Coulson had wanted to talk to River about that could be taking so long when he’d gotten the call from Abrams and Doyle.

So much for their day off.

“Hi. Sorry to keep you waiting,” River said. “Um. . .can I talk to you for a minute?”

When he’d parted company with River earlier, she’d been in an extremely good mood. Hell, so had he, given the way they’d spent the morning. Now she had a look on her face that Clint only usually saw when a mission was sliding sideways into dangerous territory. 

“Yeah, sure. Did Abrams call you, too?” Clint asked.

“No.” River suddenly looked more businesslike. “Why? What’s going on?”

“There’s some weird guy in R&D trying to get access to the lab where the cube is,” Clint said. “He’s not on the list. He’s not on any list, apparently. No one knows where he came from.”

Clint could see River set aside whatever was bothering her as she fell into step beside him. “How did he get onto the base?” she asked.

“No one knows. Yet. Trust me, people are already on it. Abrams says he doesn’t appear hostile.”

“Reporter, maybe?” River said. “Or one of the conspiracy nuts? I’ve never heard of one getting that far, though.”

Every now and then members of the legitimate press or bloggers on the lunatic fringe developed an unhealthy interest in SHIELD and decided that they were going to make a name for themselves by blowing the doors off of the organization. A few of them had even tried getting onto SHIELD bases. They tended to get turned away at the gates, and then found their lives getting increasingly inconvenient until they wisely found something else to occupy their time.

“That would be my first guess,” Clint said. Judging by what Abrams had told him, the intruder was way too sloppy to be an enemy operative. “Maybe he has a connection on base. Maybe he knows one of the civilian employees and exploited that.” In which case, that civilian employee’s days were seriously numbered. “He’s trying to pass himself off as one of the research scientists. Trying a little too hard if you ask me. Get a load of this guy.”

Clint took out his phone again and pulled up the picture that Doyle had snapped and sent to him. He passed it over to River. “He’s calling himself ‘Doctor Smith,’ no first name. He has some kind of falsified documents on him. Abrams said they looked pretty hinky. He didn’t elaborate. Seriously, though, the tweed coat? The bow tie? . . .River?”

Clint suddenly realized that he was walking alone. He turned and looked back at River who had frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the phone.

“River?” Her eyes remained glued to the picture. “River, what is it?”

River pulled her eyes away from the phone and started walking again, double-time. “We need to get to the labs,” she said, handing Clint’s phone back to him as she passed.

“What have I just been saying?” Clint said as he hurried to follow.

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Research & Development_

It was rather fun trying to talk to the SHIELD guards. It was not unlike trying to make a member of the Queen’s Guard develop a facial tic.

“Just curious, but do you get demerits or something if you crack a smile on the job? I’ve always kind of wondered about that. Do you get specialized training? Do you have to sit through a Marx Brothers marathon with a completely straight face?”

The Doctor was sitting in a folding metal chair, his legs stretched out comfortably. Abrams stood behind the counter of the guard station, keeping one eye on him and other on a trio of computer monitors. The Doctor saw him roll his eyes slightly at Doyle, who was standing “casually” in the center of the corridor between the Doctor and the entrance to the labs beyond. Thus far, they had been treating him with carefully polite suspicion, no doubt hedging their bets in case he actually was a person of importance. 

“Oh, fine. Stand there looking serious and foreboding. I’ll be sure to tell your boss, when he or she arrives, that you’ve been appropriately dour this whole time.”

When he had followed the odd energy readings down to this lower level and seen the guard station, the Doctor had known that he was going to be detained. He had counted on it, in fact. The fastest and easiest way to get answers about something that no one was likely to talk about was to speak with people who were in charge. The best way to speak to people in charge in a place like a SHIELD base was to get yourself caught in a place you really shouldn’t be. So the Doctor made himself comfortable and waited. 

There was a faint chime and the lift doors at the end of the corridor slid open. The Doctor sat up straighter and looked expectantly down the hall. Now maybe he’d get somewhere.

A man and a woman stepped off together. These two were both dressed in casual civilian clothes rather than uniforms, but they walked like people who had some rank to throw around. The Doctor felt very little surprise that the guards snapped to attention at the sight of them. 

But for all that, the Doctor noted some interesting details. The man, for instance, didn’t carry himself like someone who was career military. There was confidence there, in spades, but not the kind that came from ordering other people around. It was the kind of confidence that didn’t depend on anyone else. The woman held herself the same way, and her appearance was a bit surprising. Granted, the Doctor was not exactly the best at judging the ages of others (occupational hazard) but she seemed very, very young to be in any sort of position of authority.

The Doctor rose from his chair. “Hello. I take it that one of you is Agent Barton?”

The man stepped forward. The woman hung back a few steps.

“I’m Agent Barton,” he said. “This is my partner, Agent Song.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Doctor Smith.” The Doctor held out his hand. “I’m here to help on the research project.”

“No, you’re not.” Agent Barton’s response was both amiable and immediate, and he ignored the offered handshake. “I’m working security on that project. I know the name of every scientist involved, and your name isn’t on that list. So, who are you?”

“I’m a late addition. They just sent me over from London. See? Credentials.” The Doctor held up his psychic paper. “Royal Society. I’m a professional when it comes to researching sciency stuff.”

Agent Barton’s face wrinkled slightly. “Is that supposed to be a reference from Sir Isaac Newton?”

“No. It isn’t.”

Agent Song had stepped up closer, her arms folded across her chest. She looked remarkably like a person who had just steeled herself to put her head in a shark’s mouth. That was interesting.

“Look at that piece of paper,” she said to Agent Barton. “ _Really_ look at it. It’s blank.”

Agent Barton immediately looked back to the psychic paper. He blinked. “What the hell…?”

The Doctor’s attention cut to Agent Song. She was watching him and, underneath the grim resolve, there was something in her eyes that looked suspiciously like a challenge.

Now that was very interesting indeed.

*****

She could have just kept her mouth shut.

When River saw the Doctor she couldn’t help but stop short and stare. He hadn’t changed a bit. He looked just like he had that day almost nine years ago when she’d first met him. 

He had known her then. At least, he had once she’d regenerated (for the last time, as it turned out). He’d called her by the name that she’d since adopted. He’d talked to her like he had known her for years. But now, when the Doctor’s eyes flickered to her at Clint’s introduction, they were curious, but held no trace of recognition. 

He didn’t know her. He didn’t have the foggiest clue who or what she was. River had never banked on that.

Nine years ago, before the Doctor, Amy, and Rory had left her in a London hospital, the Doctor had told her that he’d see her in the future. She’d always assumed that he’d know her when that day came. For someone who had been as schooled in the theories of time travel as she had been, it had been an amateur’s error.

So, the smart thing now would have been to shut up and play dumb. No one, including the Doctor, had to know that she had any connection at all to this odd, gangly man with his shaggy hair and tweed jacket and bow tie. There were two things that prevented her.

The first was that she had been about to tell Clint everything herself when they’d been called to the labs. She’d been wavering right up until the moment she’d seen him. The decision had made itself then, even as it made her stomach lurch with anxiety. But, God help her, she loved the man. She owed him some answers, especially now with Melody Pond trying to slide out of the shadows.

The second was that the Doctor was _here_. He was on the SHIELD base. He was in her home. So much of what River had been taught about the Doctor had been skewed to paint him as the destructive madman. But the thing about _skewed_ was that it didn’t mean the same thing as _untrue_. The Doctor might not be the Academy’s black-hearted villain, but there was no getting around the fact that “he brought a storm in his wake” as one of the more colorful accounts put it. 

Where the Doctor went, trouble followed, and River knew that she couldn’t play dumb just to cover her own ass.

“Look at that piece of paper. _Really_ look at it. It’s blank.”

Oh, she had his attention now. Well, in for a penny. River stepped up until she was standing alongside Clint.

“What are you doing here, Doctor?”

*****

As soon as River told him that the paper was blank, it was like a switch had flipped. Clint blinked and the impressive (if fake) looking ID card was gone. What the hell had he just been looking at?

And that wasn’t even his biggest question right now.

“River, you know this guy?” he asked, only sparing her a glance out of the corner of his eye. Clint didn’t want to turn his back on the intruder. The man was looking at River the way the research team and looked at the Tesseract on the first day. 

“I do,” she said. Her eyes were likewise locked on the strange man. “Agent Barton, I’d like you to meet the Doctor.”

Ordinarily, an intruder caught in this position—detained and made in hostile territory—could be counted on to react in certain ways. Panic. Denial. Violence. Clint was braced for any one of those things and so were Abrams and Doyle, but the strange man didn’t show any indication of wanting to fight his way out. There was no sign that he considered himself to be in any trouble at all. Instead, Clint could see something in the man’s eyes that looked almost like gleeful intrigue. 

Somehow that was worse.

“Doctor who?” Clint asked.

He saw the corner of River’s mouth turn up. “That is always the question.”

Clint looked back to the man. The Doctor. “All right, start talking. Who are you?”

“She just told you, Agent Barton. Pay attention,” the Doctor said absently. He was busy studying River. “I’m sorry, have we met before?” he asked her.

“I’ve met you once before,” River replied. “But this is your first time meeting me.”

 _Whatever the hell **that** means_ , Clint thought. 

The Doctor, on the other hand, looked as if this statement made perfect sense to him. Clint really wanted to ask, but he also didn’t want to interrupt since River had the guy talking. 

“I see,” the Doctor said. “And are we friends or enemies? To be honest, I can’t quite tell.”

River smiled a little, quick and humorless. “I’ve never really worked that one out.”

“But you think you know something about me, do you?” the Doctor asked.

River’s smile was a little slower this time. Clint knew that look. She was about to go in for the kill.

“I know that you’re a Time Lord. The last of the Time Lords, if we want to be technical about it. I know that you’re the last because you wiped out your own race at the end of the last great Time War. You’ve claimed that you had no choice on that front and that you did it for the greater good, but, well, no one is really in a position to dispute you, now are they? I know that you’ve been traveling ever since in a Type 40 TARDIS with a faulty chameleon circuit. And I know that wherever you land, chaos tends to ensue, which is why I don’t look especially pleased to see you on my base.”

As satisfying as it usually was to watch River put the smack down (verbally or otherwise) on someone, all Clint could summon up in this instance was, _Okay. **What?**_

The Doctor seemed to be in the same boat. Whoever this man was, Clint got the impression that other people didn’t get the upper hand on him that often.

“Who are you?” the Doctor said, stepping toward River. He stopped immediately when Clint planted a warning hand in the middle of his chest.

“That’s far enough,” Clint told him.

River was standing her ground.

“I also know that you don’t like to travel alone,” she said. “You’re running with Amy and Rory these days, yeah? They’re around here somewhere?”

“You’re saying he has partners?” Clint asked.

“He has companions,” River said. “They’re not dangerous, but the sooner they’re contained, the better.” She turned to Abrams. “There will be two of them, a man and a woman. The woman is Scottish—tall, pretty, red hair, hard to miss. The man is English—tall, light-brown hair. They’ll most likely be together, wherever they are.”

Abrams nodded and picked up the phone to put out the call. Clint wanted nothing more than to take River aside and demand to know what the fuck was going on. The names Amy and Rory had nudged something in his memory, and at River’s description it had snapped sharply into focus. Their first in-depth interview with River, right after he and Coulson had brought her in to SHIELD. 

_I know that my mother’s name was Amelia, but everyone called her Amy. She was Scottish. She was very pretty, and she had bright red hair. My father’s name was Rory. He was English and he worked as a nurse._

Seriously, what the _hell_?

And now the damn lights were losing their minds again and there was an odd, low metallic whine coming from the guard station. Clint glanced over to see Abrams holding the phone handset away from his ear as the whine spiked its way up to a nails-on-chalkboard shriek for a few seconds. 

The sound had just died down to something that didn’t make his teeth ache when Clint heard Doyle shout, “Gun!”

The Doctor had taken advantage of their distraction and pulled a weapon.

He was pointing it directly at River.

That was all that Clint took the time to process. Two well-aimed punches and the Doctor had been disarmed and slammed face-down onto the floor with one arm twisted up behind his back and Clint’s knee digging into his spine.

“OW!” The Doctor struggled ineffectually for a moment until Clint twisted his arm warningly. He went still at that, but didn’t refrain from an indignant, distressed-sounding groan. “Oh, you _broke_ it! I’m going to need that.”

Clint glanced to the side where the Doctor’s weapon had landed. At least he assumed it was a weapon. The metal cylinder had been snapped almost in half and was now held together by a few wires. There was a light bulb at the end (honestly, now that Clint had a good look at it, it looked more like a glorified flash light than a gun) which sputtered and went dark as he watched.

“What the hell is that thing?” 

“It’s a sonic screwdriver.” The Doctor twisted his head, trying to look back around at Clint. “It was just a scan. I wasn’t trying to hurt her.”

Clint looked back over his shoulder at River. She looked a little shaken up (not that anyone but Clint would be able to tell) but she gave him a slight nod.

“Abrams, call Agent Coulson. Tell him to meet us in Interrogation.” Clint got to his feet, dragging the Doctor with him. “We’re all going to have a nice, long talk.”

Clint had a feeling that the matter of their intruder would only be the half of it.


	3. Chapter 3

_SHIELD Base, New York_   
_Security Center_   
_Interrogation Rooms D – F_

Though it was not a commonly known fact, SHIELD, since its founding, had had protocols in place for dealing with the possibility of coming face to face with an extraterrestrial intelligence. 

It made sense. Howard Stark had found the Tesseract only a few years before he’d helped found SHIELD, and every test that had ever been performed on the object pointed unequivocally to it being of alien origin. Where alien technology existed, there had to have been aliens who produced it. So it was perfectly logical that SHIELD would have planned for such a meeting.

As far as Coulson knew, he was the first SHIELD agent to ever have to put those protocols to practical use.

Coulson had read through the Pandora Protocols once, when his clearance level had climbed to the appropriate rung. They had been fairly involved. Whoever had drafted them hadn’t adhered to simplistic scenarios. They hadn’t envisioned aliens solely as hostile killing machines bent on world domination, nor had they idealistically anticipated the coming of fluffy little grey Utopians. Both of those possibilities had been covered, but SHIELD seemed to expect that most aliens would fall somewhere in the middle. 

Coulson had learned the protocols because it was required, but he had internally rolled his eyes a little and had put most of them out of his mind soon thereafter. There had been enough weird and hostile Earthbound shit out there to be dealt with without worrying very much about invasions by little green men.

As Coulson sat across the table from the alien—the Doctor—he wondered if any of his SHIELD forebearers had ever anticipated meeting a being like this. 

Though for all intents and purposes the Doctor appeared to be human, he wasn’t, and he sure as hell wasn’t trying to hide the fact. “I’m afraid I don’t really have a name, rank, and serial number,” he had said to Coulson during the first stage of this interrogation. “I’m called the Doctor. I’m an alien, a time traveler, and occasionally a candlestick maker. I’m nine hundred and nine years old and I can tell you that you have a problem brewing on your base. And I can help you if you’ll let me.”

Coulson hadn’t even tried to hide his skepticism, to which the Doctor had added, “I’m sure you have medical personnel puttering around here somewhere. Send one in to take my vitals if you need proof.”

Medical had sent over Dr. Ang, who had entered the interrogation room with the air of a man going out of his way to humor his superior. Ten minutes later he had come scurrying out again, white as a sheet, with a _holyshitholyshitholySHIT_ look on his face.

“Not human. There’s no way,” he’d reported to Coulson. “Body temperature is only sixty degrees. Blood pressure is way off and no wonder. This guy had a binary vascular system. Sir, he has _two hearts_. Two fully functioning--”

“I get it, Ang,” Coulson had said. “Go check the other two. Same drill. Just vitals, nothing invasive.”

The Doctor’s companions, though, had checked out as human. 

Now the Doctor was smiling at Coulson from the other side of the table. The fact that he was shackled didn’t seem to be dampening his mood any, nor did the large bruise that was developing on the side of his face.

“You believe me now, I take it,” the Doctor said. “I can tell by the look on your face.”

 _Shit_ , Coulson thought. This was not a day to be told that his game face needed work.

“A medical exam doesn’t lie,” Coulson said. “Two hearts and the body temperature of a human corpse. Congratulations, Doctor. You’re an alien.”

“Yes, Agent Coulson. I know that.” 

Interesting. It seemed that sarcasm crossed species lines. 

“And you say that you’re a time traveler. Would you care to explain that?” Coulson asked.

He deliberately did not glance toward the one-way mirror. Clint and River were on the other side in the observation area. Coulson hadn’t had time to confer with the two of them for very long before starting interrogations, but River had given him a few Cliff Notes on their guests and how she knew them.

Time travel had been a pretty major factor.

“It’s precisely what it sounds like,” the Doctor replied. “I travel in space and I travel in time. Often I do both simultaneously. My people developed the technology a very long time ago.”

“But you travel with humans like Ms. Pond and Mr. Williams.”

Security had found the other two trespassers wandering around one of the training gymnasiums. They were currently cooling their heels in interrogation rooms of their own.

The Doctor kept smiling, but Coulson saw a dangerous glint in his eyes. “Yes. And I do hope that they’re being treated hospitably.”

“They haven’t been harmed,” Coulson said. “But you’ll all be detained until we have a better understanding of this situation. You said that we had a problem on our base. I assume you meant something other than yourself. What is it?”

“If I’m any judge, you _will_ be having problems of a rather massive sort on this base in a matter of days,” the Doctor said seriously. “And I’ll be happy to fill you in. I’ll even help you fix things. But I have a condition.”

“And what is that?” Coulson asked.

The Doctor leaned forward, folding his shackled hands on the table. He smiled in a way that Coulson could only describe as _crafty._

“You send Agent Song in here to ask me how.”

*****

“I don’t like this guy,” Clint said when Coulson reentered the observation area.

“Yeah. I kind of got that impression from his face,” Coulson said.

Clint snorted. Okay, so he had slugged, tackled, and manhandled a representative of an alien race. He had no regrets, potential intergalactic incidents be damned. The guy had threatened River.

Clint glanced across the observation area at his partner.

She was looking through the windows into the interrogation rooms where their other two detainees were being held. Amelia Jessica Pond and Rory Arthur Williams of Leadworth, England. According to the preliminary background checks, they were newlyweds, average British citizens, both in their early twenties. Neither one had ever been in trouble with the law. A pretty Scottish redhead and an English nurse.

There was also the slight complication that they were apparently River’s biological parents. Because this day wasn’t surreal enough.

When they’d first been brought in, River had kept drifting across the observation area to stare at them with a detached sort of curiosity. “Sorry,” she had said at the one point she seemed to notice Clint watching her worriedly. “It’s just. . .I’ve only ever seen them one other time.”

Clint had decided to leave it alone until Coulson finished making the rounds of the interrogation rooms. Now, Coulson followed his glance across the room and said, “River? Could you come join us, please?”

River immediately turned away from the windows and came to stand in front of the two of them. She looked to Clint like she half expected to be tossed into an interrogation room of her own. There was a long moment of awkward silence and if it weren’t for the circumstances, Clint thought, it might be funny to see Coulson at a complete loss for words.

The senior agent looked across the observation area at Pond and Williams. “River?” Coulson said. “What the _hell_ is going on here?”

“Like I told you. Like the Doctor said.” River wouldn’t look directly at either of them, but her eyes drifted briefly back to the Doctor’s companions. “Time travel. They haven’t had me yet. If my math is right, I’m still a few years off for them.”

Clint had been working on digesting this information for the last hour while Coulson had done the first round of interrogations. He felt like he had enough of a grasp on it to ask a question now.

“So, how did you wind up here? Now?” he asked.

River shrugged slightly. “I got lost.” She forced something like a smile. “Or I guess you could say I _get_ lost. Will get lost. Tense becomes a raging bitch at times like this.”

“River, you told me that you were separated from Amy and Rory when you were a month old,” Coulson said. “That doesn’t sound like _lost_ , that sounds like. . .”

“ _Taken_.” River nodded. She looked tired. “ _Taken_ would be more accurate.”

Clint caught Coulson’s eye and raised his eyebrows slightly. They had speculated about this over the last few years, the notion that River might have been kidnapped as a child. They had always thought that it was a good possibility though they’d never been able to prove it. It looked as if they had been right, even if no sane person could have predicted anything like this.

“Taken by who?” Coulson asked.

“The Doctor’s enemies. Well, one group of them. He’s nearly a thousand years old. He’s made a fair few of them, all over Space and Time.” River crossed her arms. “Look, I know you guys have a million questions, and I promise I’ll answer them once the three of them are gone. For now, just go with me when I say that I’m the result of an epic shitstorm that has yet to hit Amy and Rory’s life, and they _cannot_ know that it’s coming. Please?”

“You know we wouldn’t do that, River,” Clint said.

Even if this situation had been anything resembling normal, they didn’t exactly go blabbing personal details in front of prisoners.

Coulson turned to the Doctor’s window. The bored-looking alien was attempting to balance his chair on its back legs. “All right. As much as I want to hear this whole story—and I’m holding you to answering those questions later—we have a major issue here. River, you clearly have more intelligence on the Doctor than anyone else. How dangerous is he?”

“Extremely,” River said without hesitation.

“So, is he playing us when he says we have a problem and he wants to help us with it?” Clint asked. “How do we know that he’s not bullshitting us? Distracting us from the fact he was trying to get to the cube?”

“He might be playing us.” River was watching the Doctor now, too. “On the other hand, he might not. He might genuinely want to help. He does that.”

River sounded almost like she was thinking aloud to herself. After a second, she seemed to remember that Clint and Coulson were both there.

“It sounds like there’s only one way we’re going to find out,” she added briskly.

“You don’t have to go in there if you don’t want to.” Clint ignored Coulson’s _Is that a fact?_ look. “Whatever’s going on, we can figure it out without playing along with him.” 

“But playing along will get us there faster.” Clint could actually see River putting her SHIELD agent face back on. “It’s fine. Besides,” she added wryly, “dealing with the Doctor is the whole reason I exist.”

*****

The Doctor was sitting with his chin resting on his folded arms when River let herself into the interrogation room. He certainly didn’t look like anything dangerous. That was a sign of just how deceiving appearances could be. River knew, perhaps better than anyone, that a mask of harmlessness, even weakness, was a very effective way to hide how dangerous you were. She’d often used that maneuver herself. She’d even used it on the Doctor the first time she’d met him, and he’d fallen for it hook, line, and sinker.

The Doctor. The Destroyer of Worlds. The Oncoming Storm. The Mighty Warrior. The most feared being in all the cosmos, soaked in the blood of a billion galaxies. The man that she had killed and the man that she had saved.

Nine years ago River had stood over the Doctor’s body, dead at long last by her hand. It should have been a victorious moment, but standing there with Amy and Rory all she had felt was something like desperate regret.

 _Is he worth it?_ she had asked them. Their answer wouldn’t have mattered. River had already known what she was going to do. The regenerative energy had still been active, and River’s hands started to glow as she stirred it to the surface. _Just tell me. The Doctor. Is he worth it?_

Amy had been the first to grasp what she was asking. _Yes! Yes he is._

 _You’d better get out of here,_ River had told them as she knelt down by the Doctor’s body. _I’m not entirely sure how this is going to work._

Now he was here at SHIELD, with no idea what the future was to bring. The shoe was on the other foot this time around.

River wasn’t afraid of the Doctor the way she’d once been. Oh, he was still the sum total of all of her childhood fears, but she’d faced him once and gotten the better of him. The worst thing the Doctor could do to her now was cause Clint and Coulson to turn away from her, and that ship was already pulling away from the wharf. She had nothing else to lose.

But she did have information to obtain, and she still had a healthy respect for what the Doctor was capable of. That meant treading with a certain degree of care.

“Doctor. I was told you wanted to talk to me.”

The Doctor sat up. He wore a friendly smile that did absolutely nothing to counter the wheels she could see turning behind his eyes.

“Hello again, Agent Song,” he said. “I wanted to apologize for the misunderstanding. The one that led to the hitting and the tackling. And the broken screwdriver.”

River took a seat across the table from the Doctor. “Somehow, I doubt you’re really all that sorry.”

“Well, I _am_ sorry about my screwdriver,” the Doctor said. “I wasn’t joking when I said I might need that shortly.”

“That’s the risk you run when you try to infiltrate a secure facility.” River folded her hands in front of her. “Sometimes your toys get broken. You should be glad that your screwdriver is all that got snapped. Why were you there, anyway? Why were you trying to get into the labs?”

“Oh, you know how it is.” The Doctor leaned back comfortably in his chair. “You follow your nose and the next thing you know you’re in trouble. It happens to me all the time. But you do find the most interesting things that way. Take you, for instance.” It was amazing how such an awkward-looking man could suddenly look so predatory. “What are you?”

River smiled slightly. “I’m a SHIELD agent.”

“You’re a bit more than that if the readings I was able to get off of you before your partner’s overreaction say anything.”

River sat back, moving her hands to her lap so that her white knuckles wouldn’t betray her. “And what kind of readings are those?”

“Inconclusive ones.” The Doctor’s eyes narrowed. “If you were simply baseline human, the readings would have shown that immediately. They didn’t. The sonic screwdriver didn’t know quite what to make of you which means you’re something else. Something a bit other than human.” 

The Doctor leaned forward again, resting his arms on the table, eying River closely. “So, what are you, Agent Song?”

*****

_Jesus, how much thicker is this plot going to get?_ Coulson thought, watching from the other side of the glass.

“That’s it. I’m going in there,” Clint muttered, heading for the door.

He did halt when Coulson grabbed him by the back of his shirt. “Stand down.” Coulson said firmly. “Let her handle this.”

Clint reluctantly came back to the window. Coulson gave him a wary, sidelong look. “Did you know about this?” he asked. “Did River ever say anything to you?”

Clint kept his eyes fixed on the interrogation room, his arms stiffly crossed. “No,” he said. “No, she’s never told me anything.”

*****

“You seem to be misunderstanding the basic structure of this conversation, Doctor,” River said.

“Have I? Well, I do that occasionally. What have I missed?” the Doctor asked.

River calmly folded her hands on the table again. “You’re our prisoner. This is an interrogation. That means _we_ ask _you_ the questions. Why were you trying to gain access to the labs?”

The Doctor stared across the table at her for almost a full minute before he sighed and sat back. “I was curious as to why you have an Asgardian power signature on your base. It’s rather a long way from home.”

“Asgardian?” River could only assume that Coulson was taking notes on the other side of the mirror. She might as well be thorough.

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “It’s a rather distinct signature. I know it well. I used to pop by regularly for visits, you see. There are some lovely picnicking spots on Asgard. And the king and queen are quite hospitable. Amazing feasts. The Asgardians can roast an ox like no one else in the universe.”

The Doctor actually seemed to be lost in blissful nostalgia for a moment. “I really should find time to swing back by,” he said “I haven’t been there for a while. Goodness, by now those two boys must be. . .” He held his shackled hands as high as he could to either side, palms down. 

“But to get back to more immediate matters,” he added, “the Asgardians aren’t necessarily in the habit of scattering their belongings about, which does beg the question of why SHIELD has one of them.”

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to discuss that, Doctor.” Setting aside the fact that no one had any clue how the Tesseract had wound up on Earth, what information SHIELD did have was classified. “Now, you said that we had a problem on base and you would disclose what that problem was if I came in and asked you. Are you planning to hold up your end of the bargain? Or do I have to persuade you?”

The Doctor looked amused. “Hints of torture and gruesomeness. Lovely. That won’t be necessary, though, Agent Song. In point of fact, you do have a problem here and it happens to involve the Tesseract. I noticed that you seem to be having a lot of maintenance issues on your base.” 

As if on cue, the overhead light flickered. River deliberately did not look up.

“And you claim that the Tesseract is causing our issues?”

River might have been more inclined to dismiss the idea if Clint hadn’t been saying the same thing for a week.

“Not exactly,” the Doctor replied. “You have an infestation of _lulya_.”

“And what exactly are _lulya_? More aliens?”

“The lulya are. . .think of them as mites or ants or like the bacteria that live on your skin. They’re not alien, strictly speaking. You find them on a lot of planets. They evolved to live off of naturally occurring energy sources, volcanoes mostly. They stay thin on the ground until a planet undergoes an industrial revolution. That tends to boost their numbers.

“They like to live in mechanical systems and they feed on residual energy; electricity, microwaves, some types of radiation. Most of the time you never know they’re there. But occasionally they find a feast of something really rich. Like, for example, ambient energy from a Tesseract. Something they probably shouldn’t eat because it disagrees with them. Or, more to the point, it disagrees with the systems they inhabit. It results in little glitches in those systems at first, but with what your colony of lulya has been chewing on, those glitches are going to escalate. Give it a few more days and that escalation will turn dangerous.”

“All right,” River said. “Supposing we believe you, how do we get rid of them?”

“I can offer them an alternate power source, one that they’ll find even tastier. That will draw them out of your systems. But I need access to my TARDIS to do it.”

“In other words, you want us to let you loose and put you back aboard your ship. That’s a very convenient plan.”

“Are you always so suspicious, Agent Song?”

“It comes with the job.”

“Have me escorted. At gunpoint if it makes you feel better. But the sooner we do it, the better. In a few days you’re going to have more serious problems than faulty lights.”

River nodded and stood up from the table. “I’ll advise my superior of your proposal,” she said and turned to leave the interrogation room.

She paused when the Doctor spoke.

“It’s funny how things work out, isn’t it?” the Time Lord said. River looked over her shoulder at him. “I knew that the TARDIS brought me here to show me something shiny and new and interesting. I thought it was the Tesseract, but now I think I was wrong.”

The Doctor was smiling at her. “I think perhaps it was _you_.”

River turned her back on the Doctor and left him alone in the room.

*****

Clint knew that Coulson had made up his mind before River even reentered the observation area.

“Do it,” Coulson said. “Let him have access to his ship.”

Clint nodded. He saw River hesitate before she spoke up, like she was a little leery of drawing attention to herself right now. No prizes for guessing why. It was the Doctor’s whole _you’re not baseline human_ line. Clint (and, hell, Coulson) knew River’s tells well enough to recognize that whatever that meant, the Doctor wasn’t bullshitting about it. 

Logically, there was really only one thing that _could_ mean, right? Although, if Amy Pond and Rory Williams were River’s time-warped parents and they were both human, Clint wasn’t sure exactly how that worked. Unfortunately, they didn’t have time for a long digression on it at the moment.

And did they need one? Okay, so maybe River was an alien. Clint did not necessarily see why this had to be a problem.

“Are you sure, sir?” River asked. “You want to cut him loose?”

“I checked in with Patrick,” Coulson said. “These ‘glitches’ are getting more frequent and they’re increasing in intensity, just like the Doctor has claimed. There was an incident with an elevator in R&D, Medical is having problems with some of their equipment, and I.T. is starting to report issues with the computer systems that they can’t account for. If this guy really can help us, we’ll let him and sort things out afterward. Besides,” Coulson added, “I want his ship found and secured and this seems to be the easiest way of going about it. River, you said it could be. . .”

“Anywhere,” River said. “The TARDIS is equipped with technology that makes it very small on the outside and it can materialize anywhere in Time and Space. It could be indoors, outdoors, on a roof, underground--”

“Precisely,” Coulson said. “So we might as well let him lead us to it before someone on base stumbles onto it by accident. We’ll keep Amy and Rory here. I’m judging that that will be sufficient leverage to keep him from trying anything.”

“It will,” River said, nodding.

“What do you need us to do?” Clint asked.

“Go with him. Stay on him. Don’t let him out of your sight,” Coulson said. “If you think he’s about to cause a problem, contain it. I’m trusting you both to keep a lid on this.”

“Yes, sir,” Clint said.

“River?” Coulson said, deliberately making her give him her full attention. “I’m trusting you. Do you understand?”

Clint was glad to see her relax slightly at that. “Yes, sir.”

“All right, get moving. Keep me apprised. I’m going to try to get through to Fury again.”

Clint and River hadn’t exactly equipped themselves to deal with a one-man alien incursion today. Their first stop, before collecting the Doctor, was the guard station to sign out a pair of comm units and side arms. Clint caught up with River halfway up the hall.

“We should probably consider putting the base on Level 1 lockdown,” she was saying. “I don’t think the Doctor is going to cause any problems, but with the lulya starting to compromise our systems, it might be best if non-essential personnel--” 

“River.” Clint reached up and caught her by the arm. “Hold up for a second.”

River allowed Clint to pull her to a halt and tug her around so that she was facing him. “Look,” she said, keeping her eyes focused on a point vaguely off to Clint’s left, “I know you have questions, and I told you I’ll answer them. But right now we don’t have time--”

“No, I get that,” Clint said. “I’m just. . .are you all right?”

“Yes. Of course. I’m fine.” River let her eyes drift up to meet Clint’s for a moment, then immediately looked away again. “Stop looking at me like that,” she said.

“I’m not looking at you like anything,” Clint replied. “Shit, River, I’m on your side here. I mean, time travel and whatever the hell else the Doctor was talking about in there? I don’t care. All right?”

Whatever River might have had to say in response was lost when all the overhead lights died, plunging the corridor into darkness for a good five seconds before they came back up. By that time, Agent Song was in full professional mode.

“Let’s just get this done,” she said.


	4. Chapter 4

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Southern Quadrant_

“You know, I don’t know why the two of you are so glum,” the Doctor said conversationally. “It’s spring, it’s a beautiful day, interesting things are happening, and we’ll get your colony of lulya taken care of in time for tea.”

The Doctor felt himself get caught between the sideways glances that the two SHIELD agents threw his way. Agents Barton and Song were walking on either side of him, and while they weren’t exactly frog-marching him, it was being made quite clear that he was under escort.

They seemed determined to see him as hostile. Of course, they were spies. Human spies. Well, human plus whatever Agent Song was. Not quite human, that one. He’d bet his favorite bow tie on it.

And it was becoming rather apparent to the Doctor that she didn’t want her friends to know that. He felt slightly bad for having exposed her in that case, but there was little point in wasting time hand-wringing over that now. Even for a time traveler, words were hard to take back.

Possibly that was why she wasn’t deigning to respond to him. It was Agent Barton who replied.

“Which building did you say you parked in again?”

“It was a rather big, official-looking one,” the Doctor said as they strolled along across the campus. “Around this corner to the left. . .now right across this courtyard. . .this one. This is the one we came out of.”

Agent Song halted. “This is Barracks 2-A.” She sounded vaguely accusing.

“So it is,” the Doctor said, looking at the numbers over the door. “Big shiny sign and everything. Is that a problem?”

“This is where we live,” Agent Barton said, keying them into the building. “When we’re living on base.”

“Ah. I see. Lovely,” the Doctor said. “Charmless and institutional, but lovely. My TARDIS is in the third floor laundry. Follow. . .er.” The Doctor broke off as he looked at the agents. “That is to say, after you. Please.”

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Security Center_  
 _The Brink of Coulson’s Patience_

Coulson resisted the urge to scream when he got kicked into Fury’s voicemail again.

He had called Fury, of course, when this situation first broke. _Sir, it’s Coulson. We have a Code Pandora on the base. Repeat, we have a Code Pandora, Level Two. Our guest has identified himself only as the Doctor. Please call as soon as you get this._

He’d tried again an hour later. _Boss, Coulson. Code Pandora is still in effect. Requesting a consult._

And now a third time. Coulson took a deep breath to hold the _For Christ’s sake, Fury, unstrap the party hat and pick up your damn phone_ at bay.

He opted for professionalism instead. 

“Sir, it’s Coulson. Code Pandora still in effect and is still holding at Level Two. Our guest is being cooperative so far. His transport is being secured under the direction of Hawkeye and Talon.”

Coulson snapped his cell phone shut with more vigor than was strictly necessary.

If he absolutely, unconditionally _had_ to get through to Fury there were ways to do it. There were overrides and contingencies in place that could make the Director reachable anywhere if the situation called for it. As much as he wanted Fury’s direct feedback right now, though, Coulson knew that they weren’t at that point yet. Hell, they weren’t even close. The Doctor hadn’t actually taken any sort of hostile action. The world was not in peril. This did not currently meet the definition of a crisis.

There was always the option of calling Hill out in California, but that would probably create more problems than it would solve. Coulson somehow didn’t think that Hill would condone his sending the Doctor off with Clint and River to hunt down a space ship somewhere on the base.

 _Get a grip, Phil._ He had this situation under control. This was his job. He was trained for this. He was leadership material, damn it.

Coulson actually jumped at a loud _THWACK_ behind him.

Amy Pond was standing in the middle of her interrogation room, cuffed hands clenched. She was glaring at the one-way mirror in a way that suddenly felt very familiar to Coulson. 

It was like River all over again.

Amy was also, he noted, now only wearing one of her sneakers. Ten would get him twenty, Coulson was sure, the missing one had just ricocheted off the mirror.

“I know you’re out there!” Amy said. “I know you’re listening! How long are you going to keep us in here, huh?”

For all of her bravado, she looked surprised when Coulson walked into her interrogation room a minute later.

Coulson had made up his mind about a few things. This situation was unprecedented, even if there were protocols for it, and that meant a certain amount of making things up as he went along. Also, his gut told him that Amy Pond and Rory Williams weren’t overtly dangerous, and they might be more inclined to be cooperative if he offered them a bit of an olive branch.

Besides, he was curious about a few things.

“Ms. Pond,” he said. “Would you hold out your hands, please?”

She complied, albeit with a wary and suspicious look. Her expression eased when Coulson produced a key and unlocked the handcuffs.

“Grab your shoe and follow me,” he said, and led the way to the interrogation room next door.

Rory Williams brightened considerably at the sight of his wife and thanked Coulson when he removed the man’s handcuffs. Whereas Amy had been belligerent during Coulson’s first brief chat with her, Rory had been respectful and fairly reserved. Very English, Coulson hadn’t been able to help thinking. Coulson had only seen a hint of an edge under the surface when Rory had asked to see Amy and been given a negative answer. 

Now, Coulson sat across the table from the two of them, trying not to look too much like he was studying them. River’s parents. River had parents. 

No wonder he’d never had any luck searching for Amy and Rory. He had been looking in the wrong generation this whole time.

Coulson gave them the mild, inoffensive smile he was so good at using on civilians. 

“I understand that you two were recently married,” he said. “Congratulations.”

It was pretty clear that whatever they’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. Still, Rory politely caught the conversational ball and ran with it.

“Yeah. We got married just this past October.” Rory’s smile was that of a man who was still firmly in the honeymoon phase. “Coming up on our six-month anniversary.”

“Well, six-months in real-life time,” Amy said. “We’ve been traveling with the Doctor most of the time since the wedding, so figuring it that way I think it’s closer to. . .ten? Maybe?”

“Yes. Time travel,” Coulson said.

“Right,” Rory said. “The Doctor can pop in for breakfast, you go off with him, three weeks later you’re back for tea on the same day you left. You learn to figure things both ways.”

“I see,” Coulson said. “That must make things complicated sometimes.”

He was dying to ask Amy if she had any relatives named Melody. Because, really, _Pond_? It was hardly a common surname. He should know, given the amount of time he’d spent running searches on it.

Coulson curbed the impulse, though. That was something else to bring up with River later.

Amy shook her head. “Not so much. You just get really good at doing math in your head.” She exchanged a glance with Rory. “So,” she added, “can we see the Doctor? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine, Ms. Pond,” Coulson replied. “He’s gone with two of our agents to check on his ship. I expect them to check in shortly.”

“Yeah, we accidentally landed in a laundry room,” Rory said. “Sorry about that. I hope it didn’t cause a problem. We were supposed to be going to Hollywood. The Doctor made a bit of a wrong turn.”

“So I understand,” Coulson said. “Is that something that he does often?”

The corners of Rory’s mouth briefly tugged upward in a wry gesture that, like Amy’s glare, was eerily familiar. Or maybe he was projecting, Coulson acknowledged. Maybe his brain was just trying to see bits of River in these two strangers. It was starting to do his head in a little bit.

“Often enough to keep life interesting,” Rory said.

“Most of the time it’s the TARDIS, really,” Amy added. “His ship kind of has a mind of her own. Usually when she goes off course it’s. . . well, it’s like the Doctor is needed somewhere that he didn’t know he needed to be. So that he can help. That’s what he does. _Helps_ people. Like he’s trying to help you with whatever problem you’ve got going on here.”

The idea of a sentient or semi-sentient ship didn’t have the power to faze Coulson at this point. His incredulity meter was officially maxed out. But he did wonder, if the Doctor’s ship had deliberately steered him here, was it because of weird little energy mites or was it because of River? 

He knew what he’d put his money on.

Coulson wondered how Clint and River were doing.

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Barracks 2-A, Officers’ Quarters_  
 _3rd Floor Laundry Room_

There were at least a dozen people in the laundry room when they arrived, security guards and other residents of the barracks. At the heart of the crowd was Patrick Easton. Clint could hear him before they could even see the man.

“Oh, he sounds pissed,” he heard River murmur.

“I have enough hell breaking loose today without dealing with someone’s cockamamie idea of a practical joke!” the head of plant management was bellowing when they arrived. “I don’t know who decided that building a blue phone booth inside of a barracks would be funny, but I am going to personally hunt that person down and make sure his ass is in a sling for at least the next month.”

“Hello! That would be me.” The Doctor waved his arm over his head to get Patrick’s attention. He smiled unconcernedly when everyone in the room turned to look at the trio in the doorway. “And it’s supposed to be a police call box, by the way. Not a phone booth.”

The entire company of SHIELD personnel just stared. Clint cleared his throat and stepped forward.

“All right, I need everyone to clear this floor immediately. Residents will be notified when you can return to your quarters. You too, Patrick,” Clint added when the man opened his mouth to protest. “We’ll call in when people can come back. In the meantime, I want everyone off this level.”

“I say. You’re actually good at bossing people around,” the Doctor said as people began to file out of the laundry room.

“Thanks,” Clint replied. “So,” he added, once the three of them were alone and the hallway outside had grown quiet, “that’s a space ship, huh?”

“As Agent Song said,” the Doctor inclined his head slightly to River, “a Type-40 TARDIS. Best ship in the universe.”

“Looks a little cramped.”

The Doctor just gave an amused snort, pushed open the door of the wooden blue box and stepped inside. River looked at Clint. 

“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” she asked.

The answer to that question turned out to be _no, not really_. Clint wasn’t sure if there was any such thing as “acute mental jetlag” but that was the best way he could think of to describe what he felt when he followed River through the door and into. . . 

Wow. So, that was what a break with reality felt like.

“Not only the best ship in the universe, but the biggest,” the Doctor called down to them. The alien was flitting around a raised platform, a control station of some kind, in the middle of the cavern of a room. “Infinite, if we want to be technical about it, so don’t go wandering off. It could take days to find you. Essentially, you’ve stepped into a separate dimension.”

The Doctor paused and leaned over the railing, looking down at Clint and River. “Come on, Agent Song. You’re not even a little bit impressed?”

Clint glanced aside at River. Good. At least one of them looked like a professional.

“I’ve seen it,” River said calmly.

“Ah, yes, that’s right. When you met me before. When was that for you, exactly?”

“Several years ago,” River replied. “I was a kid.”

“And yet you know an awful lot about me for one childhood encounter.” The Doctor folded his arms on the railing. “How is that, exactly?”

River just smiled. “Sorry, Doctor. That’s classified.”

The Doctor looked like he was planning to try to stare River down for a moment. Then he just rolled his eyes, said, “Spies!” in an exasperated tone, and turned back to messing with his console.

“Okay. So, not one of the great interrogators of our time,” Clint said quietly to River. He was gratified to get a small smile in response.

“No, not exactly,” she replied. 

“The ship is pretty cool, though,” Clint added after a moment.

River’s smile got a little wider as she reached out and patted a section of metal railing. “Yes. She is.”

*****

The Doctor glanced down through the glass floor of the control platform. He could see Agents Barton and Song conferring quietly below.

He smiled as, with a faint beep, a small hatch in the control console opened and the TARDIS offered up a brand new sonic screwdriver. “Ah, thank you, dear,” the Doctor said quietly, giving the new sonic an experimental twirl and testing the buttons. “And just to make sure _this_ one doesn’t get smashed. . .” He pulled down a view screen and keyed a series of commands into to the console.

So long as Agent Song was aboard, he might as well put the internal scanners to good use. He’d have the TARDIS give her a good, long, undetected look. Yes, there were other, bigger problems to deal with at present, but she was _right there_ and he was curious.

With the scan set up to run, the Doctor started rummaging in the storage cabinets. They were going to have to do a bit of rigging on the fly.

*****

“What the hell is he doing up there?” Clint asked.

There had been a series of thumps and several loud clangs from the platform above. It sounded like the Doctor was dismantling something the hard way. A moment later he appeared back at the railing, his arms full of thick cables. 

“Catch!” he said, tossing them over the side. “And drag them underneath around the central column there, would you?”

“Okay, I know you say you have a plan,” Clint said, even as he and River grabbed the cables and started moving them to the underpinnings of the control console. “We kind of need to know what that is.”

“It’s quite simple, Agent Barton. We’re going to create an energy leak.” There was minor cacophony as the Doctor came down the stairs pulling a large bin full of metal odds-and-ends down the steps behind him. “Lulya will automatically seek out the strongest energy signal they can detect in the vicinity. And, no offense to the Asgardians, but the energy systems of the TARDIS make the Tesseract look like a potato battery. They’ll come right for it.”

“An energy leak?” River straightened up, brushing her hair out of her face. “Your plan is to leak an Eye of Harmony? Isn’t that incredibly dangerous?”

The Doctor narrowed his eyes at her. “That thing where you keep knowing things you really shouldn’t know? It’s getting a bit annoying,” he said. “And no, I’m talking about a _minor_ leak, and a controlled one at that. It won’t be harmful and it will be certain to draw them in.”

“So,” Clint said, “you’re basically going to use your ship to create a giant bug zapper.”

The Doctor sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “The sooner I can trade the pair of you back in for Amy and Rory, the happier I’ll be. But given that I’m stuck with you for the moment, Agent Song, how are your mechanical skills?”

Clint glanced at River who frowned, but shrugged. “Decent.”

“Good.” The Doctor fished a wrench-like tool out of the bin and handed it to her. “Attach the orange ends of the cables to the orange valves, but for God’s sake, don’t open any of them. Use the brackets in the box. Now all we need is a receptacle. I have just the thing in storage. Agent Barton, I’ll need you to help me. It’s heavy.”

*****

River watched Clint and the Doctor disappear off down a corridor of the TARDIS before she took a moment to sink back on her heels.

The moment she’d set foot in the TARDIS, she’d been greeted by a familiar little psychic bump of recognition. It was an odd sensation, no doubt about it. The first time she’d experienced it, nine years ago, it had scared her so badly that she’d nearly turned tail and run away. 

Nine years ago, or a few years in the future. Either way, River had long ago figured, it didn’t much matter to the TARDIS. Time and tense were fluid and not obliged to be linear.

“I know,” River said, now that Clint and the Doctor were gone. She patted the central column. “It’s good to see you again, too.”

Hell, the ship was family too, in a way. The Doctor had even said she was the child of the TARDIS. If her life were a fairy tale (and River sometimes felt like it came ludicrously close) then the TARDIS was definitely the fairy godmother, the one who had imbued an ordinary infant with magic and launched her off on the most unbelievable journey imaginable.

“Just do me a favor and don’t give me away, all right?”

River bent back over her work again. She’d take anyone in her corner she could get right now.

*****

Clint was starting to believe that the Doctor wasn’t full of shit when he said his ship was infinite.

They moved at a good clip, so most of what Clint saw was corridor, but he did catch sight of some interesting things through open doorways: a greenhouse, a swimming pool, what he would have been willing to swear was the interior of the New York Public Library.

“Keep up, Agent Barton,” the Doctor said, trotting several paces ahead.

They ended up in a storage room that was easily the size of a SHIELD hanger, only less orderly. Fortunately, the Doctor seemed to know which pile of crap he needed. Clint found himself helping the alien wrestle a large, clear, hollow globe out into the open. The globe had metal handles on either side and had random metal valves scattered over the surface.

“Perfect,” the Doctor said, rubbing his hands together. “We hook the couplings up to the valves,” he tapped one, “and siphon energy from the TARDIS into the globe. That will give the lulya something to go after. Come on, grab a side. Let’s get this up to the control room.”

Clint cooperatively grabbed a handle. “So, these lulya are making things go haywire because they’re eating Tesseract energy,” he said, lifting his side. “But you’re about to throw them something even stronger. Explain to me how this ends well for us.”

“It’ll draw them out of your systems,” the Doctor said, maneuvering his own side.

“Yeah. And then?”

“It’s a plan in progress, Agent Barton. I thought SHIELD agents were trained to be adaptable.”

“There’s adaptable, and then there’s stupid, Doc,” Clint said as they wrestled the globe up the corridor.

The Doctor made an impatient noise. “So. Agent Song,” he said. “A bit more than your partner, I take it?”

“Don’t change the subject.”

“But she is.”

Clint counted to ten. Then he counted to twenty. “That depends on how you define _partner_ ,” he told the Doctor.

The Doctor just nodded with an irritating _ha, pegged that one!_ look. 

Maybe when this was all over, Clint thought, he’d deck him again. Just for the hell of it.

*****

Once they had the globe hooked up to the TARDIS’s power core, it was time for Phase Two. The bait was charging. Now they had to find the lulya. The Doctor could scan for their nest from the TARDIS, but he needed a good current reading to know exactly what to scan for.

“Do not break this one,” the Doctor said pointedly, producing his new sonic screwdriver. Agent Barton only rolled his eyes slightly, but the Doctor was pretty sure he heard the man mutter _No promises_ under his breath.

Agents Song and Barton followed him out of the TARDIS and into the laundry room. The Doctor adjusted the settings on his screwdriver to scan for lulya. “This way,” he said, walking briskly out of the room and down the corridor.

Halfway down the hall the Doctor halted in front of a door. “This one. I’m getting strong readings from in here,” the Doctor said.

“Yeah. Figures.” Agent Barton managed to sound both sarcastic and resigned. The Doctor turned and raised his eyebrows at him. Agent Barton just shrugged and started typing a code into the keypad. “These are my quarters,” he said, turning the knob and pushing the door inward. “After you.”

Agent Barton’s quarters were fairly large and had been constructed according to the usual specifications of clean lines and institutional greyness. But for all that, it had a long-lived-in, moderately messy quality that the Doctor could appreciate. Agent Barton must have called this place home for a while.

And it was apparently not a solitary existence. As he glanced around, the Doctor saw a pair of sneakers in the corner that were far too small to be Agent Barton’s, a scrap of something pink and lacy peeking out of some clothes piled on the foot of the bed, and some bits of feminine paraphernalia—jewelry and hair clips and the like—on top of the dresser. The Doctor glanced aside at the two agents. _Partners_ , indeed.

But that wasn’t as intriguing as what the Doctor spotted hanging on the bulletin board over Agent Barton’s desk. It was a piece of paper covered in Gallifreyan writing, a proverb so old that it had practically been a nursery rhyme in the Doctor’s childhood: _Demons run when a good man goes to war._

SHIELD just kept getting more and more interesting.

“Doctor?” He didn’t think he was imagining the sharp note in Agent Song’s voice. “Now what?”

“Right,” the Doctor said. Priorities. Lulya. “Access hatch. I need a look inside the walls.”

When Agent Barton helped him pry open the hatch in the wall, there were no small blue sparks that ran for the shadows this time. No, instead strings of crackling blue energy wound through and webbed across the exposed wires and conduits. As the Doctor raised his screwdriver to get a scan, one of them snapped out at him, forcing him to jump backwards.

“Oh, that’s not good.” The Doctor checked the readings on his screwdriver. “That is very not good.”

“Define _not good_ ,” Agent Barton said, quickly closing the hatch. 

“Agent Song, Agent Barton, when I said that we probably had a few days before this problem became a dangerous problem, I may have miscalculated a bit.”

“Miscalculated?” Agent Song asked. “Miscalculated by how much?”

“By a few days.” The Doctor was already heading for the door. “Come on. We need to get back to the TARDIS. _Run!_ ”


	5. Chapter 5

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Security Center_  
 _Interrogation Room F_

Coulson started up from his chair when the lights in the interrogation room died. A low, dull whine began to emit from the intercom system, ramping up into an undulating shriek. The lights, apparently deciding to get in on the act, began to flash in a strobe-like effect. 

It was like being back in that hellhole underground techno club in Amsterdam all over again.

“What is that?” Amy shouted over the din. She had her hands clamped over her ears. Rory had half-risen from his chair, his body angled over his wife’s as if he expected something to leap out of the now-dark corners of the room.

“Both of you, stay right here,” Coulson said, going for the door. 

One thing was for sure. This was no standard emergency alarm, and it sure as hell wasn’t a drill. Coulson could hear people shouting outside and he could see guards rushing by through the small window in the door.

But the door, which he’d deliberately left unlocked, held fast. The automatic locks had activated. Coulson reached for the keypad to enter the override code.

He hadn’t typed more than three numbers when a rope of blue energy struck out from the keypad like a snake, coiling around his hand and forearm. Coulson could feel it burn all the way through his sleeves. 

And son of a _bitch_ , that hurt. Enough to make his vision white out momentarily. After what felt like an interminable amount of time (but in reality was probably only a few seconds) Coulson felt the thing turn him loose and he instinctively stumbled backward. When his senses felt safe engaging again, all hell was still breaking loose and Amy and Rory each had hold of one of his arms, steadying him. 

“I think the Doctor’s math might have been off a bit!” Rory shouted over the alarms.

“How do we get out of here?” Amy asked.

She was right; they needed to get out of the room. Coulson shook off their hands and reached under his jacket.

“Both of you, stand back,” he said, drawing his sidearm.

There was more than one way around a locked door.

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Barracks 2-A_  
 _The TARDIS_

River and Clint followed the Doctor at a flat out run, bursting through the TARDIS doors, racing past the mess of cables and the globe (which was starting to pulse with light) and up the stairs to the control platform.

“On the plus side, the fact that they’re getting stronger will make it easier to scan for the nest,” the Doctor said, pulling down a screen and aiming his screwdriver at it. “Like tracking a heard of wildebeests that’s stampeded through wet paint.”

“Won’t the nest be in the labs? Close to the Tesseract?” River asked.

“Have you ever seen ants build a colony in a sugar bowl? No, but they’ll be somewhere close by. And wherever that spot is, it’ll be the most hazardous place to be on this base at present.” The Doctor was rapidly scrolling through images on his screen. “Like right there,” he added, pointing.

“Shit.” River’s eyes widened. “Clint, that’s--”

“I know,” Clint said. “We need to get over there.”

River saw the Doctor grin as he pulled a lever on the console.

“Fortunately for us,” he said, “we have transport.”

River felt the TARDIS’s engines thrum to life beneath her feet.

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Security Center_

Agent Coulson didn’t shoot out the lock the way Amy had expected. He said it would take more ammunition than he had in his clip and that the locks in SHIELD detention were made to stand up to a lot of abuse. It made her wonder what on earth they usually kept locked up in there.

The one-way mirror, though, was glass. Some sort of top secret, super-tough, space-age glass, no doubt, but glass. Four carefully-aimed shots left it weak and webbed with cracks. Amy and Rory exchanged a look, picked up their chairs, and finished making short work of the barrier. They were able to scramble through into the observation area; Rory helped Agent Coulson, who kept swearing and holding his burned arm tight against his midsection. 

From there, Agent Coulson led the way to the main guard station. In the utter and complete madness that was breaking loose, no one seemed to question that his two prisoners were trailing along in his wake.

“Kimball? What have we got?” Agent Coulson asked the uniformed woman at the guard station.

“The whole building has gone into spontaneous lockdown,” Agent Kimball said. “The outer doors and a number of the inner ones as well.” She moved back to let Agent Coulson see the screen at the guard station. A layout of the building was up, red lights flashing at the exits and scattered throughout. “Obviously we also have power outages and. . .well, most of the systems in the building just seem to be completely fucked one way or the other, sir.”

Amy’s attention was drawn to the wall opposite the guard station where a bank of screens showed what was going on at various points in the building. Her eyes widened and she stepped closer when she saw what was happening on one of them.

“Um. Agent?”

“How widespread is it?” Agent Coulson was asking Agent Kimball. “Is it just this building? What’s going on in Medical? Administration?”

“Agent Coulson?”

“We can’t tell, sir. I can’t raise anyone on the outside.”

“ _Oi!_ ”

Agents Coulson and Kimball finally shut up and turned to look at her. Amy pointed to the screen in the upper left corner. 

“Where’s that?” she asked.

The monitor showed part of a large, concrete-floored room, like a garage or a workshop of some kind. Inside, a group of people in SHIELD gear seemed to be trying to force open a pair of metal doors. 

“That’s a loading dock down on the sublevel,” Agent Kimball said.

“Why?” Agent Coulson asked.

“Because I just saw one of. . .there, that!” The agents they were watching hit the deck as a rope of energy shot of a light fixture, snapping at them like a bullwhip. “Like that thing that popped out of the keypad and bit you back there. Only bigger.”

For a man who looked so calm and buttoned up, Amy thought, Agent Coulson had a mouth on him that could make a sailor blush.

“Can you override the locks on the doors?” he asked the security guard.

“I’m trying, sir.”

“Rory?” Amy said, looking over her shoulder for her husband.

Rory caught her eye, his mobile pressed to his ear. “I’ve already dialed him,” he said.

But it seemed that the Doctor was one step ahead of them. Even as Amy watched the monitor, the TARDIS pulsed into existence in the middle of the loading dock.

“He’s there!”

She turned as Agent Coulson came around the side of the guard station, heading for a stairwell door. “Come on, we need to get down there,” he called over his shoulder.

He was directing the statement to Agent Kimball.

Amy and Rory followed on their heels anyway.

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Security Center_  
 _Loading Dock B_

A couple people drew guns when the TARDIS appeared on the loading dock. Most of the rest were too busy trying to find some sort of effective shelter to go on the offensive. The room was full of snapping ropes of blue light. It was like a violent lightning storm had gotten trapped in the loading dock and decided to pitch a tantrum.

Clint ducked one of the blue streaks as he exited the TARDIS.

“Everyone inside!” he yelled. When no one moved right away, he amped up the authoritative tone a few notches. “Like your lives depend on it, people! Move!”

There was a loud crack as one of the ropes of energy collided with an overhead light fixture, tore it apart, and sent it crashing to the floor. That got people moving, the able-bodied helping along the ones who had sustained injuries. Clint waved the SHIELD personnel past him into the TARDIS, counting heads as they went. One. Two, three, and four. Five. Six and seven. Eight. 

As soon as the last person was aboard, the Doctor and River came out carrying the globe between them. As they brushed by him, Clint through he could feel his skin tingle like he’d sustained a light sunburn. 

_River is not going to let this guy nuke the base._ Clint decided that that was going to be his mantra for the next ten minutes.

The ropes of blue energy—Clint couldn’t help but think of them as snakes—seemed to notice the new arrival. As soon as the Doctor and River stepped out of the TARDIS, they paused in their lashing and turned toward the glowing globe like they could actually see the damn thing. River and the Doctor looked at each other and the Doctor nodded.

“On three?” he said.

“On three,” she replied.

They swung the globe between them twice, then on the third swing, hurled it as hard as they could into the middle of the loading dock.

The blue snakes shoot toward the globe, writhing and coiling themselves around it. And they just kept coming, from the walls, the overhead lights, hell, even up out of the floor. In no time, the globe was lost in a mass of seething and pulsing blue light.

“They’ll fight themselves over it until they burn themselves out,” the Doctor said over the dull hum that filled the room, pressing against their ears. “That is. . .,” he added as there was a crack like thunder and a ripple of orange light passed over the surface of the mass of lulya. “Oh, dear.”

“Don’t say shit like that, Doc,” Clint said.

“I think we should get back inside. _Quickly_.” The Doctor grabbed Clint with one hand and River with the other and dragged them back inside the TARDIS, slamming the door behind them.

There was a roar and the windows of the TARDIS lit up with flames.

*****

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Security Center_  
 _The Aftermath_

Looking around what was left of the loading dock, Coulson couldn’t understand how half of the building hadn’t come down. Preliminary reports weren’t even showing that much structural damage and the tech from R&D who had ventured in wearing a biohazard suit and carrying a Geiger counter had assured him that radiation levels were well out of the danger zone.

That was a hell of a trick considering that it looked like half of the interior had been carbonized: metal, glass, and concrete melted together and blackened. Coulson shook his head and walked outside through the ragged open doorway. The metal doors had had to be cut away to allow for access.

The TARDIS was sitting just outside on the driveway, where it had materialized after the initial blast. The eight SHIELD employees who had been rescued from the dock had been checked over and taken to Medical for treatment and observation. Coulson had held still precisely long enough for one of the medics to bandage up his burned hand and arm; there was still way too much to ride herd on to indulge the doctors any further.

The doors of the TARDIS were standing wide open. Coulson had taken a peek inside as soon as he’d had a chance and been treated to a brief moment of vertigo at the sight of the large room inside the small box. Clint had warned him, but Coulson hadn’t really gotten it until he’d looked for himself.

He could hear voices bantering back and forth inside the TARDIS and the sound of metal and rubber being dragged and tossed into piles. The last time he’d looked in, Amy and Rory had been busy cleaning up the mess of cabling that had been strewn all over the floor inside.

The Doctor was outside on a ladder, examining the light on the TARDIS’s roof. The TARDIS itself, though it had been exposed to the same blast as the loading dock, was fine except for some streaks of black smoke on the blue paint. “Oh, yes. Those will buff right out,” the Doctor had said, scrubbing at one with the sleeve of his tweed jacket.

Now the Doctor called down to him from the top of the ladder. “Still processing, Agent Coulson?”

Coulson looked up at the man. Alien? Man. Two hearts and a space ship/time machine notwithstanding, Coulson couldn’t help but look at him like he was a person, not a creature to be puzzled over and studied.

“You don’t know the half of it, Doctor,” Coulson replied dryly.

The Doctor himself would be enough to make anyone spend some time realigning their ideas of how the universe worked. For Coulson, this was compounded by the knowledge of what this man and his companions personally meant for one of his agents. 

Speaking of which, where _were_ his agents?

No sooner had the question crossed his mind than Clint came around the side of the TARDIS, folding up his cell phone and putting it away. 

“I just talked to Patrick,” Clint said. “He says that everything’s back to normal operations. Looks like the glitches are gone. And Medical says that everyone who was on the loading dock will be fine.”

Coulson nodded. “Is River with you?” he asked.

Clint frowned. “I thought she was with you.”

Coulson felt a small nudge of dismay. He knew that River was scared over what she’d been forced to reveal to them today, but would she really have panicked and run? He had just enough time to start calculating where she might have gone and the most logical places to start searching for her when Amy’s voice joined their conversation.

“Sorry.” Amy stepped out of the TARDIS followed by Rory and, to Coulson’s relief, River. “She was with us. We stole her for a bit to help with the clean-up.”

Standing between Amy and Rory, River glanced over at Coulson and Clint with a small, half-guilty smile. Coulson just shook his head slightly. Given what had come to light today, he supposed he couldn’t blame her for gravitating toward the Doctor’s two companions.

“And it looks like it’s going to be one hell of a clean-up,” a new voice said.

Nick Fury had returned.


	6. Chapter 6

_SHIELD Base, New York_  
 _Security Center_  
 _The Aftermath Of The Aftermath_

It was almost funny, the varied reactions to Fury’s sudden presence.

Clint snapped to attention in a way that he rarely did even on the occasions when he’d landed himself on the Director’s shit list. Coulson and River, he saw, did the same. Amy and Rory just looked extremely confused at the sight of a tall bald man wearing an eye patch and a long black trench coat.

The Doctor, on the other hand, broke into a wide, delighted smile.

“Nicky!”

Clint turned to Coulson and mouthed _Nicky?_ incredulously as the Doctor jumped down off of his ladder and rushed forward to shake Fury’s hand.

“Nicky, I don’t believe it!” the Doctor said. “How long has it been?”

“Quite some time, Doctor,” Fury said. “For both of us, it seems.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said. “You had more hair then.”

Fury raised his eyebrow. “And you had less of it,” he said. “I remember you looked like you had a bit more mileage on you back then, too. I guess you weren’t bullshitting me with that regeneration business.”

“Re. . . _what?_ ” Clint said.

Fury and the Doctor were too caught up in their reunion to hear him. It was Rory who leaned over and answered.

“Time Lords can do this thing when they’re on the point of death where they regenerate. They transform, take on a whole new persona. Body, appearance, quirks, all of it. Same person, but different,” the man explained. “It’s just one of those things you learn to go with.”

“Yes,” the Doctor said to Fury. “I was on my ninth face back then. On my eleventh now. It’s been a busy handful of years.”

“Apparently so,” Fury said. “How’s Rose these days?”

Clint didn’t think it was his imagination that the Doctor’s smile turned into something slightly pained. “Well. She’s well. Off living happily with her mum and dad.” He seemed eager to change the subject, though. He looked a bit past Fury and said, “And who is this?”

A considerably smaller figure, which had been out of sight behind Fury, stepped forward and Clint’s eyes went wide when he saw who was accompanying his boss.

“Meg Downing. Former Director of SHIELD,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “Director Fury was in Toronto visiting me when we got the call you were here.”

Clint exchanged a look with Coulson. Director Downing had only ever set foot on the SHIELD base a handful of times since her retirement. Clint had actually met her once not long after his recruitment . He had been eating lunch alone in the mess hall, minding his own business, when a strange little old lady had sat down across from him. “ _Clinton_ ,” she had said. “ _I’d heard we’d brought on a new marksman. And how are you liking SHIELD?_ ”

Coulson had impressed on him later that such a meeting was a rarity. 

Clint’s overall impression of Downing hadn’t changed. She was a tiny woman—in her prime she would have been no more than five feet tall. Her hair was white and pinned in a neat roll at the nape of her neck. Her shoulders were slightly stooped and she used a cane to keep her balance. Still, even in her ninth decade of life, Clint had no doubt that this woman could seriously fuck up anyone who crossed her. 

“Yes, of course, Meg Downing.” The Doctor shook her hand, a bit less vigorously than he had Fury’s. “SHIELD’s first director. We’ve never met, but I’ve read about you.” The Doctor turned to Amy and Rory. “I tell you, this woman has one of the most interesting biographies most people will never get a chance to read. Spy for the Allies during the War. ‘Downing’s Tea Party.’ Now that’s one that’ll go down in history. Once it’s declassified, of course.”

“Thank you, Doctor,” Downing said (a bit dryly, Clint thought). “I certainly know you by reputation. And this is. . . Amy and Rory, is it?” Downing nodded to the Doctor’s two companions. “It’s a pleasure.”

The Doctor nodded. “Yes, right. Good. We’re all properly introduced,” he said. His tone had grown somewhat more serious. “And now that all the grown-ups are here,” he added, “perhaps we could go somewhere private. There are important matters that need to be discussed.”

*****

“You have something very dangerous on your base,” the Doctor said.

They hadn’t retired all the way back to Director’s office. Instead they’d gone upstairs to one of the conference rooms in the Security Center. If he leaned to the side, the Doctor could look out the window and see the TARDIS, Amy and Rory, and Agents Coulson, Barton, and Song down below. Downing stood at the window, leaning on her cane, looking over the scene.

Nick Fury was sitting across the table from the Doctor, elbows resting on the arms of his chair, fingers steepled in front of his nose. 

“I was given to understand that you took care of our little bug infestation. Quite handily,” Fury said.

“Don’t play dumb with me, Nick. You’re not very good at it,” the Doctor replied, voice hardening. He saw Downing glance back at them. “I’m talking about the Tesseract. It doesn’t belong here, you know.”

“Whether it belongs here or not is irrelevant, Doctor. It’s here,” Fury said. “The Tesseract was salvaged by SHIELD, or at least one of its forerunners. That makes it our property.”

“And I’m not accusing you of stealing it. Not that, I would imagine, it would hurt SHIELD’s feelings if I did,” the Doctor replied. “I’m saying that it’s a powerful piece of non-terrestrial technology, and there’s a good chance that one day it will attract the wrong sort of attention. Attention that you might not be prepared to deal with. Something far more dangerous than a few energy parasites.”

“Your fear is that Earth might suddenly pop up on the radar of aliens?” Fury asked. He sounded amused. “Isn’t the fact that you’re sitting here proof that that particular genie escaped the bottle a long time ago, Doctor?” The Director of SHIELD leaned forward, arms resting on the table. “And when they come, what then? You’ll be right there to sweep in and save us? Oh, I know you’ve done it before. But what happens the day that you’re not? Are we just supposed to lay down and die?”

The Doctor held Nick Fury’s gaze, not looking away, not betraying that his two hearts suddenly felt twisted, the double-tempo quickening. He’d only ever met Fury once, back when the man had been a field agent with SHIELD, under some fairly exciting and hazardous circumstances. They’d come out on top then, him and Nicky. The man didn’t know anything of the worlds the Doctor hadn’t saved, the people he hadn’t been able to help.

He didn’t know anything of the Doctor’s failures, but he had managed to punch him directly in the underbelly for all that.

“I know that you’ve said you’ll defend this world, Doctor,” Fury said, quieter this time. “That, for whatever your reasons, you’re invested in protecting us. But even you can’t be everywhere all the time. It’s not enough for you to defend us. We have to be able to defend ourselves. The Tesseract can help us do that.”

The Doctor sighed. “Touché.” 

He knew that he didn’t sound particularly gracious. He never liked being reminded of his failings, even by accident. He remembered them all well enough on his own.

That was why the Doctor had made up his mind that he wouldn’t simply _take_ the Tesseract. He could. He could be away with it and return it to Asgard where it rightfully belonged. It might mean saving Earth somewhere down the road. On the other hand, it might not. Trouble could always find its way to this planet anyway, and to take the Tesseract could rob Earth of a means to save itself. And that would be on his head.

“I do want to thank you,” Fury said, “for being here to help my people out.”

The Doctor’s smile came easier this time. “They certainly held their own,” he said. “Agent Coulson, Agent Barton, and Agent Song.” The Doctor laced his long fingers together, weighing his next words carefully. “River Song. You know that she’s more than she appears to be, don’t you?”

Not that the Doctor could say exactly _what_ she was, which was a little maddening. He’d hoped that the TARDIS would get a good long scan of her while she’d been left alone to work in the control room, and it had. But the results had again come up as a great big _INCONCLUSIVE_. Not at all helpful. All the Doctor knew was that her assertion that she was a simple SHIELD agent was as fake as the American accent she was putting on.

“A good agent is always more than he or she appears to be, Doctor,” Downing said, finally turning away from the window. She was smiling a bit. “I’ve no doubt that you mean something more ominous, of course, but all you need to know is that we have every confidence in Agent Song as a loyal member of SHIELD.”

 _Subject closed_ her raised eyebrow seemed to add.

All right then.

“Well,” the Doctor said amiably, rising to his feet, “that largely concludes my consultation. I’ll send my bill. Amy, Rory, and I have an appointment to keep in 1939. We really should be getting on our way.”

Fury rose as well and held out his hand to the Doctor. He grinned.

“Be sure to give Vivien and Clark my best.”

The Doctor laughed. “Always, Nicky. Always.”

*****

River was a little surprised to see the Doctor return with Fury and Downing so quickly.

“Right, then! Time for us to be on our way,” the Time Lord said, clapping his hands together as he walked up to the TARDIS where River, Coulson, and Clint, and Amy and Rory had been taking stabs at making polite chit-chat for the last twenty minutes. 

Most awkward children’s table ever.

“Agent Coulson, Agent Barton, Agent Song. A pleasure to meet you all,” the Doctor said. He pushed open the door of the TARDIS and waved to Amy and Rory. “Come along, Ponds. Mr. Fleming waits for no one.”

Rory nodded, lifting his hand in farewell to the agents. “Really nice meeting you,” he said.

“Yeah. No hard feelings over the whole being detained thing,” Amy added.

They stepped inside the TARDIS together. The Doctor made to follow them, then turned back, looking at Fury.

“You’ll remember what I said?” the Doctor asked.

River glanced back at Fury. The Director and Downing were standing a little bit removed from the rest of the group. River saw him nod. “I’ll remember,” Fury said.

“Good.” The Doctor turned and stepped into the TARDIS.

Then stepped back out again.

“Oh, and by the way, there’s something I always meant to tell you,” the Doctor added. He looked slightly sheepish. “Sorry about the eye.”

River saw Clint and Coulson turn to stare at Fury while the Doctor stepped back aboard and shut the door. There was the unmistakable sound of the TARDIS’s engines firing up.

Fury and Downing had walked away, but River, Clint, and Coulson remained, watching the TARDIS pulse in and out of existence for a moment before it finally faded from sight.

Well. So, that was done then.

With the Doctor gone, with everyone now out of immediate danger, there was nothing to distract Clint and Coulson from River. She felt them both looking at her.

Three years. Seven months. Six days. That was how long it had been since these two men had found her. That was how long she’d managed to live as ordinary a life as a person like her could manage, how long she’d managed to outpace her past.

At least she’d had that.

“River?” Clint said.

Deep breath.

“There are a lot of things you don’t know about me,” she said, eyes never leaving the spot where the TARDIS had been.

“Will you tell us?” Coulson asked.

In a way, it was good that it was over. No more having to hide. No more having to keep secrets. No more having to lie to people she cared about.

River nodded.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s time you knew.”

***To be continued in _This Is The Story Of River Song_ ***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Next time in the _Marvelous Tale_ 'verse Clint and Coulson get to hear River's life story, and it's a bumpy ride. Stay tuned.


End file.
